Caroline Ford

On her book Natural Interests: The Contest over Environment in Modern France

Cover Interview of February 21, 2017

The wide angle

This book challenges some of the prevailing perspectives in
the field of environmental history. First, there is a widely held view that
concern about the protection of the natural environment emerged late in France
(and in southern Europe as well as other parts of the world, more generally). They
have approached the question through an analysis of ecological thought that is
almost exclusively grounded in a scientific literature and in Scandinavian,
Anglo-Saxon, and German sources. This book argues that the history of
environmentalism should be considered beyond the writings of a small group of
savants and naturalists. It draws on a wide range of source materials, which
encompasses journalistic commentary, petitions, the writings of government
officials, diplomatic negotiations, novels, poetry, paintings, photography and
the writings of ordinary men and women who reflected on the natural world
around them.

Second, those in France who advocated the protection of
the environment and nature did not necessarily embrace the concept of
“wilderness” or unpeopled landscapes, which has been central to American
environmental thought. Early measures to protect natural landscapes privileged
historic, peopled landscapes, like the royal forest of Fontainebleau, and these
measures were not articulated in the language or present-day green activism. It
is the premise of this book that imposing a rigid and uncompromising definition
of environmentalism and a narrow understanding of what constituted an
environmental awareness predicated on particular conceptions of nature can
blind one to the ways an environmental consciousness emerges historically,
comes to be expressed and changes in particular cultural and historical
circumstances.

Third, the French case raises interesting questions about
the politics of environmental reform. It has generally been associated with the
Left in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. However, supporters of
environmental protection in France in the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries were allied to various political groups and a diverse set of
associations and individuals. It was during the Second Empire in France
(1851-1870), one of the most politically reactionary, authoritarian regimes of
the nineteenth century, that some of the major landmarks of environmental legislation
were passed, including measures taken to protect sites as natural monuments and
the implementation of a vast scheme to reforest the mountainous regions of
France in order to curb flooding. Motivations behind initiatives taken to
protect the natural world were many, and in some instances they were far from
benign, as France’s colonial policies indicate. In the case of Algeria,
environmental reform resulted in territorial expropriation and the displacement
of indigenous populations who were deemed to be irresponsible stewards of the
land. The colonial context reveals environmentalism’s darker sides and indicates
that there was no direct, reformist and enlightened historical path for
environmentalism from the past into the future. A comparison of environmental
reform across time and in the metropolitan and colonial contexts thus suggests
that environmental protection took a variety of different (and sometimes
competing) forms and that it did not follow a linear path into the twentieth
and twenty-first centuries.

The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009

[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011